**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Comments
I continue to be as mystified at people who don’t see it in this light as I am at the slowness in arriving at an appropriate restitution.
Dr. Zola
Everything is balanced.
As for devices, that's not really within the realm of what we're discussing. For that matter, if someone pushes their device after noticing it overheating from the game, it's my opinion that the onus is on them. Barring cases where people never realized.
That would normally be the case if there had been a warning message in-game. But unless I missed it, there wasn’t one. In fact, even if you hit the forums during the onset of the issues, you’d probably be left with the notion that iOS was the problem.
Dr. Zola
That's not true at all. The Forum was filled with Threads and comments on the issue.
I seem to have a different recollection. I dont have the posts handy, but the initial response suggested that iOS was a culprit.
Dr. Zola
I think the amount of permanent content you have cleared should be a huge factor in the compensation you are given!
You need an In-Game Email to investigate extreme overheating of your device?
I don't think it can be described as being better, because it is usually a subset of the same principle. Most "generous compensation packages" are designed to be as simple as possible, and following the general idea that it is reasonably fair if everyone gets at least as much compensation as what the reasonable worst case scenario likely warrants. You just guestimate that, and give it to everyone. It is simple, it is situationally unfair, but it generates fewer arguments.
Escalation, of course, is the most obvious problem with having this be your only governing compensation principle.
Zola did bring the forums into the discussion in the post GW directly responded to. But I don't think he's correct in implying that it would have been easy to know with certainty that the problem was definitely with the game and not iOS. In fact, iOS did have a performance issue that could have caused overheating around the same time the game's overheating problems became more prominent on the forums.
This is the post I recall from July 6, when there was quite a stir about overheating. Which is my point: there was nothing in-game ever (not that I received), and players like me were trying to figure out what was wrong with their phones for a day or so. Venturing onto the forums, I believe this was the first official pronouncement other than asking for information on the issue (OS, model, etc.). “Worst offenders” is the phrase i couldn’t remember, and it appears to single out 11.4 as a source of the problem.
If it wasn’t clear, I meant that it was ambiguous what caused the issue to players at the onset. So playing to the point of shutdown may have alerted players to a problem with 19.0, but it also may not have. I think that’s the point @DNA3000 makes above (and that I was making).
Dr. Zola
If this wasn't the case I completely agree with @DrZola on the fact that compensation should also take into account the inconvenience factor which it seems is not happening in this case.
One final thing. When the overheating issue started surfacing on the forums there were no official warnings from Kabam about the issue. Whether it was the game or an issue with ios it doesn't matter, it should have been Kabam's job to warn everyone that there was an issue with how the game interacted with ios both in game and out of the game so that there something official for everyone to see. The blame for damage to devices lies on both the user and the provider. It is not fair to say that it is completely Kabam's fault for players pushing their devices past their limits. But it is also not fair to say that it is entirely the players fault for playing a game that was provided to them when there was no official warning from Kabam in game or on the forums. In my experience the blame hardly ever lies solely in one party, but is usually a combination of multiple parties in the wrong. It is our job to take the blame where it is our fault, but the same applies for Kabam. Anyways, that is my two cents worth.
There are usually trade-offs to make—policy decisions, really, about who to advantage or disadvantage. Relief for glitches will often not be congruent, but I believe the key should be to never be incongruent on the low side for those adversely affected.
Dr. Zola
I appreciate your point, but it is only my opinion that it’s a “better” guiding principle in this case. I suppose I weight the customer satisfaction aspect a little more here than I do the need to calibrate precisely what is appropriate, especially given the seemingly broad range of severity of problems involved. Fewer arguments about this, in fact, might be good for the forums.
But I agree there are other valid methodologies for determining the relief. And some are arguably “better,” but all have their weaknesses.
Dr. Zola
I don't think I made my point clear. I'm saying that the desire to be simple and the desire to be generous are independent choices that anyone setting policy is forced to make. You *must* decide whether to be simple or complex, and you *must* decide whether to aim high or aim low. And part of the reason is that the very definition of what "generous" means depends on how you intend to treat your customers: simply, or in a more tailored fashion. "Generosity" can only be judged to be a better guiding principle than "simplicity" if both generosity and simplicity are even valid guiding principles. But I don't think in practice either can be alone.
Do you have a definition of "generous" that doesn't intrinsically imply you're going to treat the customers broadly and simply, or discretely and individually, that is still specific enough to serve as a guiding principle for designers?
Ideally, relief could be readily tailored for each specific case. But I don’t think that’s even remotely feasible to deal with everyone discretely and individually here, which means we are necessarily dealing with rough parameters.
If I were to try to articulate what “generous” means in this process, I’d need to first have a fair concept of what nearly a month’s worth of play meant to players at various representative levels. Then I’d need to calibrate how much of that month’s worth of stuff reasonably was stuff that was negatively impacted by my product malfunction. That’s probably not a simple calculus, but it potentially could be straightforward.
Generosity, then, would be going above that calibrated, representative basket of stuff by either (1) increasing the quantities of stuff or (2) adding more and different stuff known to me to be valuable at each representative level. If I wanted to be sure I didn’t badly misstep, I would probably solicit the help of some fair-minded constituents to sanity-check my determinations and my “generosity.”
In that light, “generous” operates as more of a procedural principle than an intrinsic element of the calculation. That’s an about-to-fall-asleep stab at how I would approach it. But I fear it’s just you and me talking to each other here now.
Dr. Zola
Either way I'm gathering that the discussion is no longer about why the compensation is not accomplishing what Kabam is intending it to and more about how they should go about the idea of compensation.
For the first week they kept deleting threads an not even acknowledging that there was as problem with overheating.
@Werewrym I wouldn’t worry about it. A fraction of my flags are somewhat legitimate, while the others are members who don’t like what was said. The only positive is that flags are supposed to garner attention from forums officials, so perhaps someone will read your thread and take it to heart.
Dr. Zola
I seem to recall overheating is
In an ideal world, we would. Since the 5* pool expanded to 80+ champs a month or so ago, I’ve convinced myself I have about a 1/3 shot at a new champ or a dupe I would be excited about. In my last 7-8 crystals, however, I haven’t wound up in that “1/3 Good” category at all.
I’m confident it’s random. Even so, I would like to see some sort of regular reporting of how that randomness plays out in-game. For example, it would be nice to see the distribution of crystal pulls from the GwenPool Goes to the Movies Epic quest exploration crystals—not because I think the game team purposefully rigs the crystals (they don’t), but because I think it would be helpful to understand what an acceptable level of randomness means to the people who code it into the game. Think of it as a “mini-audit” that gets shared with the community.
Dr. Zola
I like that idea. I wish we were allowed more selections in a poll so that we could have one post where we could compile a list of the variance between champion drops. I realize it would be a very small percentage of the total crystals opened, but I still think it would be interesting to see.
I wasn't too worried about the flags, I just don't understand these forum trolls sometimes. I kind of suspect that there are people going around flagging all of the threads that mention compensation.
The same should be applied here but from the looks of it this is going to be almost as disastrous as 12.0. What has been stated as the goal for compensation is the equivalent of the manager, instead of doing what I described above, comes to your table removes the 90% of the meal that you couldn't stomach and brings back exactly 90% of that same meal recooked and considering the problem solved. If you were sitting at that table you would be insulted and I dare say you would either go to the corporate level or th owner and complain until it was made right.
They will display wether they understand how customer service works or not based on this compensation package. If it is exactly as that one moderator describes, there will be uproar. It will be a disaster and they will have to do something else to make up for it.
In my first year of playing this game I spent over a thousand dollars on this game. Since March/April I have spent less than $100 and I've determined not to spend anymore on what I see to be a sinking game that has no desire to keep any loyal customer base.
That is a good analogy. To put my original post into your analogy what is being done with the compensation currently is as if the restaurant had messed up everyone's meal (whether it was their fault or a malfunction in their machinery it doesn't matter). The restaurant decides to replace everyone's meal with the same meal regardless of who had ordered what and how expensive it was. For this method there is a group of people happy because they got a meal more expensive then what they originally paid for. There is a group of people who are unhappy because they got exactly the same thing they paid for, at no reduced price. And there is a group of people who are angry because they got a meal that was less than what they paid for originally.
In the end only a small portion of the player base is actually happy from a generic package sent to everyone. The point here is that with one generic package for everyone, even if you are only compensating solely for what people missed out on, you are still going to end up with 2/3 of your customers either unhappy or angry (assuming all three parties have an equal number of players).
I really don't understand how this is an acceptable method for compensation and I hope that they realize how much is riding on this package/appreciation event that they are putting together. It's not so much about free stuff, but about the reputation of Kabam and the satisfaction of their customers.
They don't need to sell if u rank 5*s or rank 4*s high enough ur prestige is fine just bc someone doesn't reach highest prestige bracket isn't my problem
Yeah. Not everyone goes to the forums. Kabam made our phones overheat no the companies.